Quotes About Power

It will be necessary to repeat the year 1793," wrote Lenin. "After achieving power, we'll be considered monsters, but we couldn't care less."22 Lenin and his self-described group of "glorious Jacobins" would monstrously do just that, and, indeed, could not care less.

Who or what is driving it? Well, no one can really say, or see. Who is the leader, the face? Nobody. If there is any driving "philosophy" that rules the modern world, it is the dictatorship of relativism, in which everyone is his or her own guiding power. Such is another apt phrase of Benedict that goes hand in hand here.

Few professions were sized up by communists quite like the teachers' unions.

Mr. Johnson: Yes; that is true, because I know from my own experience in working in labor organizations, for example, that we had an organization with 10,000 members, and there were only about 60 or 70 Communists, and we controlled the organization. So with small minority of ministers who work in an organized manner, they can always win over and subvert and dupe the majority who are disorganized and are individualistic.

Indeed, Marx and Engels willingly conceded that this program would require despotism. They stated of their ten points, "Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.

He stated emphatically that "Socialism cannot be brought into existence without revolution.

Look, we've seen this over and over again—three times since 1980. Republicans rail against budget deficits when they're out of power, then drop all their concerns and send the deficit soaring once they are in a position to cut taxes. Then when it's the Democrats' turn, they're expected to clean up the Republicans' red ink rather than address their own priorities. Enough already.

When people who hold most of the levers of power do the same thing, their fantasizing isn't a delusion, it's a tool: a way to delegitimize opposition, to create excuses not just for disregarding but for punishing anyone who dares to criticize their actions.

All it takes are a few billionaires willing to spend a small fraction of their wealth supporting politicians, think tanks—or actually "think" tanks—and partisan media willing to spread the tax-cut virus. That's easily enough to keep the zombies lurching along.

Political scientists studying the behavior of billionaires find that while many of them push for lower taxes, they do so more or less in secret, presumably because they realize just how unpopular their position really is. This "stealth politics" is, by the way, one reason billionaires can seem much more liberal than they actually are—only the handful of liberals among them speak out in public.

we're now ruled by people who are willing to endanger civilization for the sake of political expediency, not to mention increased profits for their fossil-fuel friends. About

It is important," said Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, "to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes"—some of them, he declared, "swollen beyond all healthy limits.

On the other hand, we should never discount the power of dishonesty. Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the second coming of Leon Trotsky, and millions of people will believe them. Let's just hope that the rest of the media report the clean little secret of American socialism, which is that it isn't radical at all.

Floating below me were five-hundred-pound wallets with teeth.

JP Morgan spelled it out: for neoliberalism to survive, democracy must fade.

With info-capitalism, a monopoly is not just some clever tactic to maximize profit. It is the only way an industry can run.

or we don't – and disaster follows. It has become common to laugh at the absurdities of the climate-change deniers, but there is a rationality to their response. They know that climate science destroys their authority, their power and their economic world. In a way, they have grasped that if climate change is real, capitalism is finished.

The root cause, simply put, is globalization, and the resulting monopolization of wealth by a global elite.

A lesson to people who think that, just because they're a little smarter and luckier than ordinary people, they can do as they please.' Lisa

This is our world now, whether you accept it or not. In some ways, we are pawns to greater powers. Expendable to a greater game. I'm not a pawn. You are if you don't wake up and do something.

Leave your jewels in the bank," / the Countess told the girls. "The only thing worth / wearing's a revolver." It seems she shot one officer point-blank. / The whole world's foundering. A smoke trail tells / of the fates of Caesar, Alexander. Those who kissed their hems. / Tara's plowed under. Troy eventually fell. / Surely the English will get what's coming to them?

The importance of minority does not reside in the fact of its relative exclusion from the majority but in the political potential of its divergence from the norm.

A man's life will not come again, once it has slipped through his teeth. And no power on earth can bring it back. This is the mortal law. Then no longer will his bones be held together by wet sinews. Then no longer the soul flutter in his mouth. But by Death's blazing light, he is ground out and spent.

the exercise of authority was not an easy business, especially if those who exercised it no longer felt they had heaven on their side. That